Additional things that happened yesterday, below:

We began learning Flash in my digital media class. After about 10 minutes playing around with it my professor predicted I will need Flash rehab by the middle of next semester. We were getting a lesson from Alan, one of the four digital media fellows, who are former students acting kind of like super-TAs. I like Alan because he’s a nerd about things I find interesting like data and maps, and because he wonders about things like where the universal “pause” symbol of parallel lines came from. This is the funny part: He was instructing us to use the fill tool in Flash for a practice exercise and pointed out it’s the same symbol that’s been used for the fill tool in practically every program ever, though he wasn’t sure exactly why. We were all like, “You mean the paint bucket?” And he was like, “Yeah, the paint b– oooohhhhh! That’s what it is!”

Which reminded me of Brian at the Evergreen asking why the Bryan Hall Clock Tower rang more times some hours than others. Hahaha. In all fairness, today I was complaining to my mom on the phone that “it’s getting darker here so much earlier now, it seems like all of a sudden it’s dark by 5:30 p.m.” Apparently now that clocks are smart enough to change themselves, the humans are getting dumber.

I walked by a bloodmobile after class and decided to donate, which reminded me that I gave blood on Halloween senior year at WSU and was late to class because of it. But I did get a great tacky T-shirt. This time they had no T-shirts, but I wanted to give blood to absolve some of my guilt about not running the marathon (see marathon post). The blood people were nice. They were also watching some sort of soap opera show, and right when the woman was pulling the needle out of my vein one of the characters said, “I took the pregnancy test – and it was positive.” The blood lady gasped a bit and I subesquently bled somewhat more than necessary. And they didn’t ask me what color bandage thing I wanted, so I had purple on my arm before I could even mention how much I liked the turquoise color.

Later on I was trying to buy ribbon downtown in the flower district before all the trimmings shops closed at 5 p.m. It was probably like 4:58 and I’d already been in half a dozen places that would only sell by the spool, not the yard. I passed a place that was clearly closed, but the employee outside looked friendly so I asked about ribbon. He yelled to the guy inside bent over a desk, apparently the owner, who gave some imperceptible response. The man outside invited me in, chatting about the people walking by in costumes and the strange weather and I couldn’t ever quite tell what he was saying. I picked the ribbon I wanted and he asked the owner how much they wanted to charge. “Halloween present,” he said without looking up from his books. I was genuinely surprised and thankful and acted that way, then thanked them again and left. Free ribbon!